


Last Days

by mysterycultist



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Blood and Gore, F/F, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, Mage Fenris (Dragon Age), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, brief weed smokage, demon kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 08:36:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12009030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysterycultist/pseuds/mysterycultist
Summary: Fenris cures his amnesia, and Hawke sees God.This is about reidentification, if anyone's looking for that.





	Last Days

You are standing in the jungle. Way in the distance, twenty feet away, a grey man is standing against a tree. A beam of sunlight cuts over him, through the space in the canopy left by the tree you felled. The trunk of it lays across the clearing, steam rises from the moss, and from the massive pile of its leaves a thousand red-winged bugs slowly rise.  

The man is a qunari. Your arm hurts. You are gripping your greatsword very hard—the disproportionate tension up your arm feels suddenly concerning. 

This anxiety washes over you, and your skin is hot, sticky and wet. The qunari is breathing very hard. Air whistles out of his mouth and nose, twenty feet away. He is struggling for breath, holding his stomach, and blood is falling out. 

You check behind you, and you set your hand to the shoulder of the little girl standing there, then step to the right to block her view. You keep watching the man die.  

You are in the Fade. 

 

\-- 

 

Hawke sits, smiling, across from you in the low light of the tavern, in the red light of the burning candles above her head. Her arms are on either side of the great, salty, decrepit wooden throne that has her name carved into it, her wrists hanging off the sides, a smoldering white stick barely remaining between two knuckles. Her eyes are a deep amber. 

She brings the blunt to her lips, closes her eyes, and sucks. The tip crawls to her skin and burns red. 

"I just think that the answer is always simple." Smoke pours from her teeth. She holds her lips carefully over them. "If it seems complicated, it's just because you're running from the truth." 

She is now a shell of a woman. An icon of Andraste hangs heavy on her chest. 

She's brought you here because you collapsed again. Your eyes rolled to the back of your head, blood fountained over your lip and began to foam, and you hit the dirt with your head ringing like the Hightown Chantry bells in the hauntingly quiet center of the Lowtown market. 

You had been shopping with her, because you had not seen her in three weeks, and you were telling her, as you shopped, that she was a demon, an abomination, and everything was falling apart. 

You imagine her hauling you up and carrying you with your arm over her shoulders and hers hitched under your ribs, sneering brightly at the few elves and thieves out in the sun and miasma, walking your corpse casually to the Hanged Man and dropping you in her chair, where you slowly came to, ordering the barkeep to nurse ale down your throat until the color came back as she sauntered upstairs to get the elfroot from Varric, and all the time not saying that a thing was wrong, because that is exactly what you do when you find her standing in a dark corner or sitting at a desk with every muscle pulled tight and hard as wood, with her eyes flickering wildly under the lids, blue flame licking between her long, skeletal fingers. 

You, she and Anders are all falling apart. Merrill is, in comparison, perfectly fine. 

Hawke pushes your mug at you, and you take it. You set it to the side. Your chestplate is lying on the floor; you're in your shirt, and there is blood down the front and up the arms. There are two black lines burned up your skin for every blue one. This is becoming normal.  

You lean in, on your elbows, the laces of your shirt black with dry blood and bleeding a soft rust into the ale spilled over the table. You ask simply, no malice this time, just a question: "What are you doing to us?" 

She pulls at the last of her blunt and it crumbles to ash in her fingers. She rubs it away; white flakes fall to the floor. Her hands are red and can't be burnt. "Don't ask me, ask God." And she touches the icon at her neck. 

"But you think you are God." This, you say with malice. 

Her mouth turns up. She is deeply unhappy. "No, you're right. I'm not God. I took a wrong turn." 

You exhale. This is when you know you're all in your last days. 

 

\-- 

 

You, Hawke, Varric and Anders are walking down from Viscount's Keep, and Hawke sees you watching the scythes of the twin golden templars that guard the Chantry rise, over the white walls, as you descend.  

"Let's go to chant," she says. 

You ignore her; Varric begs off, embarrassed, and Anders continues to smoke blue with anger, but in her direction. All at once, it stops being a joke, and you agree to do it, and Varric is brought around to agree that it feels right, and in all his constantly smoldering anger, Anders's eyes go wide as Chantry windows, beside himself that any of you would actually do something so simple to make him so genuinely upset. 

Anders storms away and the three of you kneel together on the red carpet. You look at Varric with his head so self-consciously tilted down, his strong, square hands so carefully clasped, and you know that he would only do something this delicate with Hawke, and you are only seeing it now by the grace of her, by your shared trust in her, and this actually brings you closer to him. You feel the bond between you three glow and hum, tender and so, so fine. 

You watch Hawke look up at the face of Andraste with both eyes open, the shape of a golden sun glowing, from the stained window, onto her forehead. 

 

\-- 

 

Anders slams a cabinet shut, latches the lock with a sound like vice gears clicking, whirls around and slams his beakers down on his worktable. 

"The veil is torn to shreds, there's nothing here to protect you anymore. You're like a candle to moths, the spirits are eating you alive. It's not anything complicated." 

You're sitting on one of his filthy examination tables. You're too breathless to stand diffidently. You test your mouth, lick your lips. So dry. 

"Flies to a corpse." 

He stops banging around and turns to look at you. Then, he shrugs. "Suit yourself. 

"And the lyrium poisoning is progressing," he says. "I really don't know what they did to you, Fenris, a  _mage_  should barely be able to survive that much raw contact as long as you have. What wonders of science must be discovered up there in Tevinter! It really makes you see the blasted god-forsaken fucking darkness we're living in down here. Like cavemen! Do you know what that is, Fenris?" 

He's back on the floor, scratching around in the dirt under his table for stray embrium leaves, and he turns again to blink innocently up at you. 

"It's a primitive." 

You lick your lips again and clear your throat. "Your face is cracking again." 

He scowls at you and touches his cheekbone, where blue light splits the skin. His fingers come away black. He turns and kneels back into the shadow of the table.  

"It'll heal," he says. 

 

\-- 

 

You are in the jungle islands at the north of the world. Tiny red beetles are settling on your legs and arms to eat the blood. A qunari is dying against a tree. 

Suddenly behind him, half hidden by the tree trunk, you see an old man in thickly embroidered robes. His head is hooded. His beard is pointed, grey and black. The lines on his face and bare hands are hard and black, and his eyes are black, and he watches you with a wide, rictus grin.  

He is waiting for you in the afterlife. 

You fall to your knees. A little girl steps in front of you. She is thirteen years old, her skin is brown, her hair is black, and her ears are pointed. She raises both her hands and presses them over your eyes. 

 

\-- 

 

 

Hawke sweeps her hand over your brow, cold as ice. You fight your eyes open. You sit on a hard wooden bench, you lay heavy against the wall of the boat. She sits opposite you.  You're being rowed over the water; oars rise and fall on either side; the Gallows rise ahead. The golden slaves glitter in the sun. 

She stares hard at you, eyes narrowed.  

"Are you there?" 

You blink at her and wrinkle your nose. You let yourself remain deadweight. "I should be asking you." 

She leans in over her knees, long black hair falling in greasy strings into her thin face. "No. It's just the tall green monster now." 

She grins. Her sharp incisor glints dully, her eye glints dully. 

You set your hand on her face, and the grin dies away. 

"Maker, you have to feed yourself, Hawke." You didn't know you were in pain until you heard yourself speak. "You have to sleep." 

You say that, but you don't actually hope that she will. You know she won't. There isn't point in trying. 

She sets her hand over your hand, rings and long bones, closes her eyes and lets every breath drain from her body. 

"I miss sleep," she says. She doesn't now, because when Hawke sleeps, Hawke doesn't always wake up. You will come into her great hall and she will stand at her desk, talking brightly to you, and you will talk to her as if someone was there until, as soon as you step into range, she spins and grabs you by the throat with her eyes glowing green. In a way this is nothing tragic, and it's nothing really new. It's a revelation of who Hawke has always been, the terror you have known as long as you've known her—and if you call her your friend, the terror is your friend, too. 

Once she was a little girl alone on a farm, and she had nightmares. For miles and miles there was no light to kill the night but the tallow candle in her hand, or her hand. It's not a happy story.  

As the Gallows sway closer, and Isabela and Varric drift by in another boat to your right, she opens her eyes and touches her cold hand between your eyes again. She touches your skin three times, in three dots. 

Her white lips part, she draws breath to speak—bit she lets it go, a cold rush against your face. 

 

\-- 

 

Merrill sits before you lucid, drinking tea. You don't understand why she is fine. 

"I know who I am," she trills, and blows on her cup. "I suppose I'm just a clear-headed atheist, Fenris." She tilts her head, her delicate chin and long, thin neck, and puffs. "I really don't know what to say. I wish I did, very much. Even for you, I feel like every time I see you you're sticking a flat little knife." She taps her chest. "Between my ribs. I'm all little red cuts. I'm just so sick of death." 

You are in her little house in the elven alienage. Her hearth crackles and you don't feel it, your head is pounding and you cradle it in one hand, collapsed in one of her pillowy chairs, and your tea has gone cold. You used to hate her, but it was only ever on principle, and you no longer have that in you. To strangers you have touched her arm and called her your sister.  

"I'm going to be useless when it all comes down," you say. "I never expected that." 

Your eyes are closed. You hear her puff on her tea, the fire crackle. 

Before Marethari died, she was nothing like this. She was a chattering fog of confusion and anxiety. Now something has snapped, but it snapped perfectly straight. 

Even now, though, her tension is palpable, because it is in everyone who lays down to sleep in Kirkwall. 

"Are you an atheist?" you ask, an afterthought. 

"I don't know," she sighs. You open your eyes, and she is searching the rafters desperately with her wide green eyes. Her hands clutch her cup, glowing faintly. 

"Maybe," she says, and bites her lip. You let your eyes shut. 

"All of you walk the Fade in such a fog," she says, a little high. "As if you're looking—you're looking for your god. It's not so kind, Fenris." 

You smile, and your chest constricts painfully when you exhale. "I don't walk the Fade," you say, and pass your hand over your cold teacup. 

There's a small silence. 

"Fenris," she says quietly. "Why did you do that?" 

You frown. You open one eye. 

 

\-- 

 

You are standing in the shadow of the dockside warehouses as the moonlight reflects in waves off the harbor. Your sister is standing on the dock, your perfect mirror, staring at you as you stare at her: like your own cadaver, somewhat sad, somewhat sour. 

Aveline is knelt, untying a little boat in which her husband sits, holding a light. He is going to take your sister past the Gallows, to one of the other islands, and he will put her on a ship that will take her to Ferelden, which is the best any of you can do for her. She came back to Kirkwall not to you, but to Hawke, to beg shelter, and Hawke had to tell her to go. 

Your sister inhales and licks her teeth. Reluctantly, she says, "Leto." 

You smile and shake your head, just barely. You don't ask her your mother's name. You don't ask her anything, because all of that is truly dead to you. She is dead to you: you stand reflecting a ghost. 

She turns her face away from you. Her hair catches red in the thin moonlight. 

Aveline stands and calls for her. Variana stands still. 

You watch her work up the pressure to speak, and when she does, she says, "You were always bigger than me." The words fall heavy from her mouth. 

"Of course I was," you say, gently. "I was three years older." 

She looks at you startled, bewildered, and you blink and you frown. You're twenty-seven, you realize dimly. The numbers fall into your head, very simple arithmetic, as if you have been keeping track all this time. You don't like knowing this. 

 

\--- 

 

You are in Seheron, and you are fighting back another tall, wiry elf. His blows fall heavy on your sword, your sides ache, your eyes ache. A qunari, falling into your sightline every few seconds, is dying against a tree.  

You beat the other elf back. Your every muscle sings. His leg buckles underneath him, his eyes go wide, for a perfect moment, a frozen deer, and you slice his head clean from his shoulders. 

His thin body falls to the mud and a warm hand closes around your shoulder.  

You look up and an old man in robes that billow around your legs is grinning down at you. 

"Good," he says. "Now make him go away." 

You drop to your knees, into the mud, and scramble to the body. The hands lay curled, the arms limp, the neck bare and glittering white inside. You press your hand to its chest, and it's already cold. Nothing happens. You close your eyes and brace for pain, your skin pricks up your spine, but nothing happens, and you look up. 

A tall human woman is walking out of the underbrush, past the tree where the qunari lays still, in the line of light left out of the canopy that you cut away. Black hair falls down her back, rings drip from her fingers, and she carries a staff with the figure of Andraste carved from its head. Her eyes glow green. When you see her, a cold hand grasps your heart. 

She kneels down to you. You are small, and your front teeth aren’t there. You're shaking. 

She brushes back your short hair and whispers in your ear, "You're afraid, Fenris." 

Your eyes have rolled into the back of your head, glued shut, and when you snap them open, a little girl is kneeling with you. Her skin is white, her hair is black, and her ears are round. 

She holds her hand out to you, and you touch your fingertips to hers. Her eyes are amber. 

 

\-- 

 

Your sister raises her hand, opens it, and it alights a soft purple. It glows in the dark harbor; the wisp spins around her hand like silk. 

For another moment she looks at it, then she raises it to her face and blows. 

The wisp swims to you and you catch it, unthinking, raise it to your mouth and blow. Your breath pulls at its shape, it clings to your hand, and it dissipates. A bright blue glow sighs, briefly, through your skin. 

Variana turns away, and a thin line of her cheek reflects the moonlight. 

"Leto," she says, and you say, "That's all right." It's all right. 

   
\-- 

  

You pass Anders on your way to Hawke's estate, and you brush your hand over his feathery shoulder. You look back to see him looking back at you, dumbstruck, and to yourself, you smile. 

You barely feel like yourself. Your identity feels like a vanishing dream. 

You're let into Hawke's great hall, you walk into her library, and she is standing over a desk scattered with books and papers. In the moment before she hears your feet on the tile, you see a line of blood crawling down her stiff, hard wrist. 

She hears you and her muscles unravel, smooth as silk. 

"Hawke," you say.  

She turns her face to the side; you glimpse her smiling wryly. "I've been performing heresies," she says lightly. 

You step closer, light as air, and pretend to read the book spines on her shelf. "Aren't you always?" 

She laughs. The spines are finely worked leather under your fingertips. 

"Carver was really the only person who could ever calm me down," she sighs. She finally turns all the way around, rests on the edge of her desk, smiles at you. "Maker, I miss him." 

You look from the corner of your eye. "Do you?" 

She sucks her lip, nods deeply. "All the time. All the time. I know he's out there, somewhere. It still hurts to not have him with me." 

"You had a long childhood." 

"Long and dark. That's poetic, isn't it, Fenris?" 

"Yes. We should publish together." 

Another laugh bubbles from her throat, and you listen to her step toward you, your fingers numb on the books. She touches her fingertips to your arm, a fire runs out over your skin in lyrium veins, and you spin to grab her face as her ice cold fingers grasp your throat. 

Her lip curls, her eyes seep green steam, your breath turns to ice in your lungs, you wrench her face to yours and you kiss her. 

First her teeth grind against yours, then she melts into you; her hand goes slack on your neck, slowly thaws, runs caressing down your chest. You can feel her touch through your armor, through your leather.  

She knows every secret of your body, she knows where not to touch and how to touch, because she  _is_ Hawke. 

You put your hand to her hair and her back and you pull her more firmly to you; you hold her, and your skin sings, it is searing you. You can barely breath for the smell of sulfur she breathes into you. Her eyes flutter open and seep green. 

Blue flame licks at her fingers. She scrapes her fingernail up the hard lyrium line that runs the length of your arm, and you gasp. It is as if there is a pinprick hole in you, and she is pulling you out. 

You gasp again, for pain, and her lips part, her back arches, you watch her long throat as she swallows. You somehow fight the weakness in your arms to raise them and grasp her face. 

"I want it back." You are choking. You swallow convulsively, you taste iron. "I thought I didn't want it, but I am ready for it now. I want to know. I want it all back." 

You watch your hands begin to shake. Her gaze is heavy, she has to wrangle her eyes to look at you. She looks drunk. 

"Are you making a deal, Fenris?" 

Your brow furrows. You feel this. You open your mouth, but you can't find the words. 

She shakes her head. She clicks her tongue. "No, you're not." 

"I'm not," you manage. You feel bereft. 

"But--" Her voice, is small, pleading. She touches your forehead, and you go blind. "Are you sure? Are you—Are—" 

Her breath catches. 

Her hand falls, trailing, down your face, and the white begins to fade. It fades to your heartbeat. Your heart is racing. You see your hand, and it is phasing in and out, here and gone. You are here and gone. 

Her face is turned into your hand and her eyes are rolled into the back of her head, and you watch as blood fountains over her lip. You watch as she begins to choke. You come back to your body. 

You turn her over, your hand on her stomach, you lean her on your arm and blood falls from her mouth to the tile in one, great splatter. She coughs. You run your hand over her back. You don't know what to do. Your pain is gone. 

Her muscles seize, hard, and she convulses—You hold her up, it takes all your strength—She yells—She doesn't scream—just  _Aaa_ _aah_ —clearly pronounced, and loud, and then she is pulling away from you, stepping away from you, hands in her hair, still dripping blood to tile. 

You watch. She keeps walking, paces slowed, rubbing her temples, breathing hard. Her blood drips. 

"I'm not all gone," she says. She sounds dragged through the mud. 

She looks at you. Her eyes are amber. She drags her arm over her mouth. 

You fall back against the bookshelf. It rocks with your weight, then settles. You close your eyes. You see three white dots. 

When Hawke speaks, she is across the room. "You've kept me in the dark from the day we met." 

You open your eyes. She is back to the opposite wall, pressed to the bookshelf, looking at you like something she fears.  

You lick your lips. You test your mouth. "I love you," you say. You've been trying to say it; it comes out now. 

She blinks at you, she opens her mouth, and she buckles with a laugh. 

"Fenris," she says, laughing. 

"I'm sorry." 

"You've hurt me  _badly."_  

You slide lamely down to the floor, and you hear her footsteps, then you hear a shuffle. When you look, she is crawling the last paces to you, and she drops her body against the case, against you, like a bag of very beautiful rocks. 

"You've hurt me  _so badly_ ," she pleads, and hugs her arm around you. "Andraste, I'm doing myself in, aren’t I?" 

"You have been." 

You are still seeing trinities. Your arm is around her now. You don't remember putting it there. "I think I used to be a mage," you say. It sounds very strange coming out. 

You look down at her, and her wan face is pressed to your shoulder, and she's looking up at you. "I know," she says. 

You mean to kiss her, but you begin to sob. It's not something you can stop. 

 

\-- 

 

She asks you to sleep in her bed that night, and you do. Your dreams are a wild collision, a rush of words, shattered of meaning, feverish. You are in the Fade the whole time. You wake with her arms around you, her sleeping lips pressed to your jaw. 

You walk to Darktown in the morning frost, the fog still rising from floor to ceiling down the fetid aisles, pouring out of the three-story windows. You are down here to find a Tevinter mage you know of and to not necessarily kill him, but to take his books. You need to take action, that much is clear in the morning light, and learning is action, but before you find the Tevinter, you see Anders. 

He is kneeling at the little Darktown altar.  You stop to watch him. A dripping red sun is painted on the wall. A row of crates is shoved to the wall, covered, mounded and dripping with old, hardened wax. Just a few wicks remain lit. 

His eyes are squeezed shut and he is whispering the chant, his voice is rough with the pressure of speech.  

You kneel beside him, and you don't chant. He continues on and for a moment, you think he'll ignore you, and then all of a sudden he shuts his mouth. His teeth click together. 

"You know," he begins conversationally, then it breaks down. He holds silent. He rakes a hand down his face. He says, "When I see her, I see God." 

And you wonder, do you? Do you. 

"It's all right," you say, slowly. "That you love her." 

You have never hated him for that. 

He stands. "It's really not," he says, and he goes. 

 

\-- 

 

In the tavern, with blood drying down your chest from your collapse, Hawke was explaining to you that the simplest answer is the right one, and Andraste was a mage who met a great and powerful demon. Demon was the word she used, not spirit. You still think about this. 

 She explained to you, with her eyes clear and lucid, drinking a mug of ale, arranged like a set of bones in her Hanged Man's throne, that Andraste was an Avvar and the Avvar revere mages. Her mother and sister were alchemists. What are alchemists, she asked? And tapped her nose. 

She found the Maker in her dreams. Her dreams? Who finds anything worthwhile in her dreams but mages, she wanted to know? 

"She was a slave to Tevinter, too," Hawke said, as if that were not known. She sipped at her ale, suddenly shy, and watched you over the rim. "You remind me of her." 

That made no sense to you, especially because she had spent the past eight years reminding herself of Andraste. 

You remember touching your glass to your lips and not drinking. You set it down and said, "That is believed in the Imperium."  

She looked as if you had plunged a sword into her heart. 

 

\-- 

 

You walk past the qunari lying dead under a tree into a thick southern forest. You hear a stream. Past it, in a clearing, Hawke is on her knees, her eyes are pressed shut, and she is praying. She is praying with her hands at her sides and her face turned blind up to the sun. 

She is begging for the Maker, and she hears nothing. You see a man, standing in the shade of the trees, at a distance ahead. He's young and his beard is dark, and he is watching her in total silence. 

You go to her, you touch her face, and she opens her eyes. 

 

\-- 

 

On the day that it happens the miasma is thick from Lowtown to Hightown, and she does not receive the inspiration that lets her save them all. Before the messenger comes, you are all sitting in her library, drinking ice and trying to escape the heat. 

All of your eyes are purple from nightmares; Varric's are purple from simple insomnia. Hawke is in her armchair, reading a letter from Carver. When she finishes she smiles, wide and dumb, and when she brings the paper to her lips to kiss it, the red sun of the wax seal is made translucent by the light, over her forehead. 

Anders is standing against the side of the bookcase, black feather coat dangling from his arm, his forehead pressed to his arm on the case and sweat pouring down his temples and neck as he laments. He turns his face from his sleeve and says, oh, a breeze, and he presses his hand to his back as he sighs. 

Merrill sits at Hawke's desk, head tilted perfectly on her slim neck and her arms spaced evenly on the tabletop, looking up from her writing every few moments to smile at one of you. 

Isabela lays on the rug, glaring up with watchful eyes, displeasure in every tension of her shoulders, her chest, her jaw. One of her hands is on Hawke's bare foot, and her feet are in your lap. She holds a chalice of ice water straight over her body, and in a steady, gradual stream, she pours it down on herself. 

You, on the floor with Isabela, are playing the flute, smiling into the music, and hear not a word. You don't feel that you need to. Your vision is fading in and out of white as you let your mind wander over all the world, as if you could dream while you're awake. Your arm brushes against Hawke's leg, and she is finally warm.

Varric is trying to cure his insomnia by drinking himself to sleep, and he watches all of you. 

The messenger comes. 


End file.
